Radha Gobinda Maiti was born to Manindra Nath Maiti and Basanti Debi in Rambhadrapur, a remote village in (then undivided) Medinipur, West Bengal, India. Theirs was a poor farming family. Between the floods of the Keleghai river and the occasional drought, bountiful years were few and far between. Manindranath had built a mud hut next to his brother's. His brother had a school education, something of a rarity in those parts at that time.  Radha Gobinda's unusual interest and aptitude in learning, one suspects, was nurtured by this uncle of his. 

Life was not easy for young Radha Gobinda, but it had its charm. It was lived amongst lush green fields, with ponds large and small surrounding the house, a stable with a couple of cows, and a large tamarind tree in the backyard. Why hard-working farmers should remain poor in such land of plenty would become the central question of his adult life. 

He was the eldest of three brothers, with Ananta and Prashanta following him. It was obvious from his childhood that he was by far the most academically gifted, not only in his family, but in the whole village. Children older than him, in the upper classes, used to come to him with their math problems, which he had an uncanny knack for solving. He would go on to become the first college graduate from Rambhadrapur, then the first Master's degree holder, the first Ph.D. and the first Professor at a university. He maintained a "first class" throughout, which was possibly a tad tougher seven decades ago than it is now. 

However, you would not know about his accolades even if you interacted with him for years. He of course knew that he was likely the smartest person in  any room that he was in, but he never felt the need to prove it. On the other hand, one would easily discover from even a casual conversation with him that he was brimming with ideas about how to improve the lot of the farmers in our country. 

Radha Gobinda studied Agriculture in the RBS College of Agra University in Bichpuri, UP (with a scholarship, the only way he could afford it), and finally obtained a Ph.D. from there. He did not study agriculture to get a job, he studied it with the ferocity of a person who must find solutions to burning problems which would let his kith and kin survive. He applied his knowledge and experience directly to the field. He viewed the academic publishing industry with a certain disdain, because he knew that most published research had no concern for the farmers on the field and no power to improve their lot.  He found it sad that too often a village farmer would fail to get an answer to his specific questions from the community of agricultural scientists.

Farmers sought Prof. Maiti out with a vengeance. They used to meet him in the village meetings and in the farm fairs. Many of them made a trip to Kalyani to meet him. Kalyani was where he lived most his adult life as a professor in the Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya. Every week, dozens of letters from the farmers used to arrive by post. He always made time to answer each of them individually, and in detail, till in his seventies when he became incapacitated with Parkinson's disease.  He was a copious contributor to  magazines meant for the farmers (such as Sobuj Sona, Nabanna Bharati and many others) and also for the common folks in newspapers (such as Bartaman, The Statesman and Ananda Bajaar Patrika). He was a popular figure in farm-centric talk shows on the radio and on the television. He also wrote several insightful books on farming. His prose was lucid, often witty, and  always shone with his deep knowledge on the subjects that he wrote about. 

He sincerely believed that horticulture is the right way for the farmers, especially in West Bengal, to earn enough for their labour. He introduced and developed many varieties of plants and vegetables in the plains of Bengal to facilitate economically rewarding agriculture. If you have ever admired a colourful stick of gladiolus in these parts of the country, you should probably be thankful to him for that. Scores of farmers, especially in the Kolaghat area and in the Hooghly and Nadia districts would be thankful to him for inspiring them to start the cultivation of flowers and garden plants, which ultimately transformed their lives. 

 He was a perfectionist, but was tolerant of faults in others. This was the most apparent in his dealings with his students, whom he considered to be a part of his family. It is quite unbelievable that many of his students from half a century ago  regularly visited him till his last day. Generations of students revered him to be a titan of the university.

He was a gentle human being who loved to chat, loved music, loved cooking, loved gardening, and most of all loved his family. He married Namita Biswas (a history graduate from a lawyer family in Krishnanagar) and they had two children: daughter Susmita, and son Sudipta. He raised his children in a free but supportive environment where they were never explicitly asked to study and were hardly ever punished for anything. However, he just had a gentle expectation that they would do well in school, and that they would be rational, honest and fair to others in life. It was hard for the children not to strive to meet these expectations of their doting father.  

In many ways, he symbolized the generation who grew up around the time the nation gained independence.  We are now nearing the 75th year of the independence, but we  need people of his kind today just as much as we did at the dawn of our nation.